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Thursday, September 10, 2015

Redesigning Dying

Dying is in serious need of a redesign. This is the point of BJ Miller's TED talk that was given several months ago and is now available to watch at the TED talk website. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highlight encourage you to watch it.

BJ, the Executive Director of the Zen Hospice Project and a true leader in palliative care, gives an inspirational talk about the certainty of death, the current approach our health care system takes to care for the dying, and various “design cues” we can take including our need to lift our sights to making life more wonderful rather than less horrible as death approaches.

This talk is a great reminder that as a community we can use our natural creativity to rethink dying. Not to go against it, but as BJ says in his talk:

"We can design towards it. Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well -- not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination."

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